Protect your bread
Plus our Top Incense Burn-Off & more
Welcome to Blackbird Spyplane
Check out our comprehensive new Home Goods Index.
The B.L.I.S.S. List — a helpful rundown of Beautiful Life-Improving Spyplane Staples, from incense to sweatpants to underwear — is here.
Mach 3+ city intel for traveling the entire planet is here.
In today’s Plane we’ve got:
An Incense Burn-Off to determine our No. 1 Coil / Stick to Set on Fire
We helped whip up a Beautiful Linen Bread Bag to keep your boules & batards fresh, and it’s out today
More unbeatable recon
Let’s get to it —
Here at HQ we’re known to literally “get this bread,” in the sense that we cop fresh-baked loaves on the reg. But how to keep a boule or batard tasting its brightest while you work your way through it? For centuries, people have turned to linen bread bags to get the job done. So we hit up the linen-garment-crafting Spyfriends at NYC’s Blluemade to see if they wanted to develop one with us…
And today we’re extremely stoked to release them!
The thinking here was simple. Blluemade specialize in great linen garments. Erin and I (Jonah) specialize in Unbeatable Recon that we often conduct before during or after eating the world’s finest bread, whether we’re copping these artisan loaves or occasionally baking our own.
And get this: When it comes to storing bread, linen is natural technology perfectly built for the job. It breathes and wicks moisture, which helps keep bread fresher-tasting and with a much nicer texture, for longer, than if you store it out, or in paper, cotton, or (mamma mia) plastic.
But there aren’t many bread-bag options out there we really loved the look of. So at the start of this year we hit up Blluemade about collaborating on a no-nonsense, high-quality linen bread bag. They whipped up a prototype, we all tested & refined it, and the finished product is out today…
The Blackbird Spyplane Blluemade Bread Bag (BBSPBBB) has an overlock seam running along the outside of a curved shape, so crumbs don’t get trapped in corners. There’s a natural-cotton twill tape drawstring, and a hand-stamped custom design that we put together inspired by old line drawings of flax and wheat.
The bags were cut & sewn in NYC’s garment district using undyed 100% Belgian linen: After the flax is grown and farmed “in small non-industrial plots of farmland,” it’s woven into fabric in the town of Meulebeke at Libeco, a heritage mill founded in 1858, which carries the prestigious “Masters of Linen” certification.
Because if you’re going to buy a linen LOAF-DUVET, why accept anything short of master-grade fibers? The Spyplane x Blluemade 100% linen bread bags are out today in a small run, priced at $60 each.
These are perfect for your own breadkeeping purposes, and in the spirit of breaking bread with friends & family, they make a lovely gift, too (if you buy a pair, domestic U.S. shipping is free.)
You can read an interview Blluemade did about the leavened arts with NYC baker Amadou Ly at their site here. The bread bags are coppable here.
Meanwhile —
The members of Spy Nation are the most blessed, tasteful and self-respecting readership across all media, so it’s no surprise that they want their homes to smell their very best. To that end, we continually get questions from readers as to what incense we are f**king with.
We are not “incense somms” by any measure, but our noses are nice with it, and we do make it a point when we are doing Unbeatable Recon at home and abroad to keep our eyes and nostrils open in case any fine wafting aromas cross our paths. We’ve put our favorites in the scents & incense section of the B.L.I.S.S. (Beautiful Life Improving Spyplane Staples) List.
But — with colder, wetter weather keeping us indoors more, reading these books and playing these records — we recently assembled a tight cluster of different incense sticks and coils, from old favorites to promising new contenders, and engaged in a Spyplane HQ Incense Burn-Off to see which one we loved most.
And when the smoke settled, we felt grateful to have so many great incense in the lab, because all of them are excellent, and yet we had a clear favorite: